Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...

Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone… unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t…

  • solarzones@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Thinking about starting my own personal email server, but to use it seriously I’ll have to weigh the pros and cons. If anyone has anything on this to share I’d appreciate it.

    • davehtaylor@beehaw.orgEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      Short answer: Don’t.

      Long answer: It is a massive amount of work, not just to setup, but also to maintain. On top of the fact that the big email providers block smaller email servers like crazy. Even if you had business class Internet service at home, the IP range is most likely already in their block lists. And if you have it on a VPS, the amount of time and effort it takes to get the security and filtering going properly is nightmarish.

      It really sucks, but it’s a fait accompli.

      • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Would agree.

        Even when done 100% by the book and correct. Companies like Google and Microsoft, in particular, will just randomly send the email to spam.

        I gave up after years of fighting the good fight and went to googles free tier. That is now over and I probably just need to move to some other service.

        Also dont use a gTLD or if you do, have a backup .com or .us as well. Many forms dont recognize things like .email as legit.

      • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Additionally, these days the sheer amount of flak that a self-hosted mail server gets are enough to make a lot of providers ask you to either shut it down or go somewhere else. Probably 80-90% of the server’s inbound network traffic will be bots trying to brute force access (usually over POP3 or IMAP4, though occasionally SSH) to use it as a spam relay as well as relatively dumb bots just assuming that your server is an open relay and trying to send garbage through it. That kind of traffic hogs a lot of bandwidth and the hosting provider will have to do something about it to keep their infrastructure stable. Also, figure that you’ll be spending about as much CPU time on the server for anti-spam processing on a 24x7 basis.

        I have to agree with other commenters, it’s just not worth the hassle and kinetic pattern baldness these days.

      • 1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        To anyone not scared off by this, my mail server is based around this guide. I make some changes, but I think it does a good job explaining the various moving parts and a way of setting them up:

        https://workaround.org/ispmail/bullseye/

        There are also some easy to deploy dockerized projects that I hear are good like mailcow.

        https://mailcow.email/

        –

        Managing e-mail is a bit of a pain, especially the initial setup, and finding clean IP spaces. But honestly I spend very little time managing mine. Months go by where I basically do nothing.

        …then microsoft or google do something stupid, or a user gets infected and send some spam I don’t catch, and I’ve got a day of hecticly trying to get mail flowing again while users send me nastygrams